Key word for this dialogue: olbios 'blessed' (for the initiated) and 'prosperous, happy' (for the uninitiated). The cult hero is olbios 'blessed' after he or she dies. The worshipper of a hero becomes olbios 'blessed' by making contact with the hero.
Most relevant is a word we have considered at length already, sēma. In Passage A, note the sēma of Achilles, which looks out over the Hellespont.
In Passage A, we see a retrospective glance at the Iliad - in the Odyssey.
A) Odyssey xxiv 35-97: "Happy [olbios] son of Peleus," answered the ghost [psukhē] of Agamemnon, "for having died at Troy far from Argos, while the bravest of the Trojans and the Achaeans fell round you fighting for your body. There you lay in the whirling clouds of dust, all huge and hugely, heedless now of your chariot-riding. ... Then, when we had borne you to the ships out of the fray, we laid you on your bed and cleansed your fair skin with warm water and with ointments. The Danaans tore their hair and wept bitterly round about you. Your mother, when she heard, came with her immortal nymphs from out of the sea, and the sound of a great wailing went forth over the waters so that the Achaeans quaked for fear. ...The daughters of the old man of the sea stood round you weeping bitterly, and clothed you in immortal raiment. The nine muses also came and lifted up their sweet voices in lament—calling and answering one another; there was not an Argive but wept for pity of the dirge they chanted. Days and nights seven and ten we mourned you, mortals and immortals, but on the eighteenth day we gave you to the flames, and many a fat sheep with many an ox did we slay in sacrifice around you. You were burnt in raiment of the gods, with rich resins and with honey, while heroes—horse and foot—clashed their armor round the pile as you were burning, with the tramp as of a great multitude. But when the flames of heaven had done their work, we gathered your white bones at daybreak and laid them in ointments and in pure wine. Your mother brought us a golden vase to hold them—gift of Dionysos, and work of Hephaistos himself; in this we mingled your bleached bones with those of Patroklos who had gone before you, and separate we enclosed also those of Antilokhos, who had been closer to you than any other of your comrades now that Patroklos was no more. [80] Over these the host of the Argives built a noble tomb [tumbos] on a point jutting out over the open Hellespont, that it might be seen from far out upon the sea by those now living and by them that shall be born hereafter. Your mother begged prizes from the gods, and offered them to be contended for in a contest [agōn] of the noblest of the Achaeans. You must have been present at the funeral of many a hero, when the young men gird themselves and make ready to contend for prizes on the death of some great chieftain, but you never saw such prizes as silver-footed Thetis offered in your honor; for the gods loved you well. Thus even in death your kleos, Achilles, has not been lost, and your name lives evermore among all mankind. But as for me, what solace had I when the days of my fighting were done? For Zeus willed my destruction on my return [nostos], by the hands of Aegisthus and those of my wicked wife."
I note in this passage the portrayal of Achilles as a beau mort.
For a Modern Greek parallel, compare this poem by Ritsos, which was set to music by Theodorakis, reworked by Hadzidakis
(translation by George Syrimis)
mallià zgourà pou pàno tous ta dhàhtila pernoùsa
tis nìhtes pou kimòsouna ke plài sou xagripnoùsa
frìdhi mou gaitanòfridho ke kontilogramèno
kàmara pou to vlèma mou koùrniaze anapamèno
proinoù ouranoù ke pàskhiza min ta thambòsi dhàkri
hìli mou moskomìristo pou os làlages anthìzan
lithària ke xeròdhendra ki aidh"nia fterougìzan
Curly hair through which my fingers I would pass,
the nights you slept and next to you I kept vigil
That eyebrow for me, sword-curved eyebrow and pencil-drawn
- an arch in which my gaze would nest in peace.
Blue eyes in which would shine the distances
of a morning sky, and I toiled that they would not be blurred by tears.
Those sweet-smelling lips for me, when you spoke there was blossoming
of stones and dried out trees, and nightingales would flutter.
In Passage B, we see a prospective glance at epic beyond our Odyssey - in the Odyssey.
B) Odyssey xi 90-137: Then came also the ghost [psukhē] of Theban Teiresias, with his golden scepter in his hand. He knew me and said, 'Odysseus, noble son of Laertes, why, poor man, have you left the light of day and come down to visit the dead in this sad place? Stand back from the trench and withdraw your sword that I may drink of the blood and answer your questions truly.' [97] So I drew back, and sheathed my sword, whereon when he had drank of the blood he began with his prophecy [= words of a mantis]. [100] 'You want to know,' said he, 'about your return home [nostos], but the gods will make this hard for you. I do not think that you will escape the eye of Poseidon, who still nurses his bitter grudge against you for having blinded his son. Still, after much suffering you may get home if you can restrain yourself and your companions when your ship reaches the Thrinacian island, where you will find the sheep and cattle belonging to the sun, who sees and gives ear to everything. If you leave these flocks unharmed and think of nothing but of getting home [nostos], you may yet after much hardship reach Ithaca; but if you harm them, then I forewarn you of the destruction both of your ship and of your men. Even though you may yourself escape, you will return in bad plight after losing all your men, in another man's ship, and you will find trouble in your house, which will be overrun by high-handed people, who are devouring your substance under the pretext of paying court and making presents to your wife. [118] When you get home you will take your revenge on these suitors; and after you have killed them by force [biē] or fraud in your own house, you must take a well-made oar and carry it on and on, till you come to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food, nor do they know anything about ships, and oars that are as the wings of a ship. I will give you this certain token [sēma] which cannot escape your notice. A wayfarer will meet you and will say it must be a winnowing shovel that you have got upon your shoulder; on this you must fix the oar in the ground and sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a boar to Poseidon. Then go home and offer hecatombs to the gods in the sky one after the other. As for yourself, death shall come to you from the sea, and your life shall ebb away very gently when you are full of years and peace of mind, and your people shall be prosperous [olbioi]. All that I have said will come true.'
We see here a prophecy of the sēma of Odysseus. His body will make his worshippers olbioi because he will be olbios in death.
We have just seen in what we have read a "crisis" in "reading." The word crisis is derived from...
krisis 'judgment, crisis', abstract noun derived from krinesthai 'judge, distinguish, make distinctions'; hupo-krinesthai is the way for a seer to answer a question about a vision seen by someone else, as in the case of Penelope's dream.
kritērion = criterion for judging, distinguishing, making distinctions
kritikos 'critical' (in both senses: 'crisis-related' or 'criticism-related')
Consider again Odyssey i 1-10: That man, tell me about him, O Muse, about that many-sided man who wandered far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. Many cities did he visit, and many were the people with whose customs and thinking [noos] he was acquainted; many pains [algea] he suffered at sea while seeking to save his own life [psukhē] and to achieve the safe homecoming [nostos] of his companions; but do what he might he could not save his men, for they perished through their own sheer recklessness in eating the cattle of the Sun-god Helios; so the god prevented them from ever reaching home. Tell me, as you have told those who came before me, about all these things, O daughter of Zeus, starting from whatsoever point you choose."
Odyssey i 3 Odysseus saw the cities of many and came to know their/his noos
Odyssey i 5 Odysseus seeking to win as a prize his psukhē, plus [his nostos and] the nostos of his companions
noos of Teiresias at Odyssey xi 493-495 / nostos is first word of Teiresias at Odyssey xi 100
Compare Odyssey xi 121-137 with the different version in Odyssey xxiii 267-268: there it is made explicit that Odysseus is to travel through the cities of humankind. The "journey of a soul" through many different cultures, with different values, is key to noos.
Compare Odyssey i 3: Odysseus, by virtue of traveling throughout the cities of humankind, comes to "know" noos. The question remains: whose noos?
Odyssey xi 126 'I will give you this certain token [sēma], and you cannot have lēthē about it'.
Compare the clip from Kurosawa's Dreams in the film archive, "A gravestone marker for a journey of the soul."
'winnowing-shovel' at Odyssey xi 128; it is a mistake to translate as 'winnowing-fan'; a winnowing shovel looks just like an oar, but a winnowing-fan does not.
C) Two variant tales, collected by folklorists in early-20th-century Greece and analyzed by William F. Hansen, about St. Elias [known as the Prophet Elijah in the Hebrew bible]:
Variant 1[a]: Saint Elias was a seaman who lived a dissolute life, but he repented of what he had done and thereby detested the sea. {Variant 1[b]: because he had suffered much at sea and had often nearly drowned, he became disgusted with voyaging.} He resolved to go to a place where people know neither what the sea was nor what ships were. Putting his oar on his shoulder he set out on land, asking everyone he met what he was carrying. So long as they answered that it was an oar, he proceeded to higher and higher ground. Finally, at the top of a mountain he asked his question, and the people answered, 'a stick'. Understanding then that they had never seen an oar, he remained there with them.
Variant 2: The Prophet Elias was a fisherman who, because of terrible weather and terrific storms, became afraid of the sea. So he put an oar on his shoulder and took to the hills. When he met a man, he asked him what it was he was carrying; the man answered that it was an oar, and Elias went on. The same happened when he met a second man. But at the top of a mountain, he asked a third man, who replied, 'why, that's a stick'. Saint Elias resolved to stay there. He planted his oar in the ground, and that is why his chapels are all built on hilltops.
Variant 3: In some versions, the natives' decisive answer is not 'a stick' but 'a baker's peel' [phtyari tou phournou = "winnowing-shovel of the oven"].
Feast Day of the Prophet Elias: July 20. This date coincides, roughly, with harvesting season. It is around this time when wheat is gathered and winnowed.
There is a hero cult of Odysseus in Arcadia, where he is worshipped together with Athena as goddess of pilots and Poseidon as god of the sea (Pausanias 8.44.4); note that Arcadia is mountainous and landlocked. Of all locales in mainland Greece, it is farthest away from the sea.
Planting of winnowing-shovel on top of a mound of winnowed grain (Theocritus 7.155ff): a symbolic gesture, meaning "the harvest is accomplished = finished."
Tomb of Elpenor: Odyssey xi 75-78, xii 13-15. This sēma 'tomb' is also a 'sign, signal, symbol' meaning "the sailor is dead."
D) Odyssey xix 106-114: "Lady," answered Odysseus, "who on the face of the whole earth can dare to chide with you? Your fame [kleos] reaches the firmament of heaven itself; you are like some blameless king, who upholds righteousness [= good dikē], as the monarch over a great and valiant nation: the earth yields its wheat and barley, the trees are loaded with fruit, the ewes bring forth lambs, and the sea abounds with fish by reason of his virtues, and his people do good deeds under him.
This word dikē means 'justice' (long-range) and 'judgment' (short-range). The sign of dikē is a thriving or blooming field / garden / orchard / grove / vineyard / etc.
E) Aristotle Poetics 1452a29ff, discussing "recognition scenes" in e.g. tragedy: "Recognition [ana-gnō-risis] is ... a change from ignorance to knowledge [gnō-sis], tending either to affection [philia] or to enmity; it determines in the direction of good or ill fortune the fates of the people involved" (tr. Margaret Hubbard).
F) From Odyssey xix 535-569: "Listen, then, to a dream that I have had and interpret it [= make a hupo-krisis of it] for me if you can. I have twenty geese about the house that eat mash out of a trough, and of which I am exceedingly fond. I dreamed that a great eagle came swooping down from a mountain, and dug his curved beak into the neck of each of them till he had killed them all. Presently he soared off into the sky, and left them lying dead about the yard; whereon I wept in my room till all my maids gathered round me, so piteously was I grieving because the eagle had killed my geese. Then he came back again, and perching on a projecting rafter spoke to me with human voice, and told me to leave off crying. 'Be of good courage,' he said, 'daughter of Ikarios; this is no dream, but a vision of good omen that shall surely come to pass. The geese are the suitors, and I am no longer an eagle, but your own husband, who am come back to you, and who will bring these suitors to a disgraceful end.' On this I woke, and when I looked out I saw my geese at the trough eating their mash as usual." [554] "This dream, lady," replied Odysseus, "can admit but of one interpretation [hupo-krisis], for had not Odysseus himself told you how it shall be fulfilled? The death of the suitors is portended, and not one single one of them will escape." [559] And Penelope answered, "Stranger, dreams are very curious and unaccountable things, and they do not by any means invariably come true. There are two gates through which these unsubstantial fancies proceed; the one is of horn, and the other ivory. Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them. I do not think, however, that my own dream came through the gate of horn, though I and my son should be most thankful if it proves to have done so."
Here I invoke again the key word krisis.
Again we see a crisis in reading... krisis 'judgment, crisis', abstract noun derived from krinesthai 'judge, distinguish, make distinctions'. A hupo-krisis (verb hupo-krinesthai) is an answer to a question that generates such a krisis.
After Odysseus achieves a physical nostos by literally coming home to Ithaca, he still needs to achieve a mental / moral / emotional nostos, For this to happen, the characters in the second half of the Odyssey have to connect with him on various levels. The key to this "connection" is the hero's ascending scale of affection.
The characters involved in the hero's ascending scale of affection include: his dog; his loyal servants, like Eumaios and Eurykleia; his son; his wife; his father. All these characters have to "read" the disguised Odysseus in order to recognize him. Correlated with recognition is philia.
A primary form of philia: the relationship between lovers.
The challenge of "reading" Odysseus is the challenge of "reading" the ulterior motives of his ainoi. The ainoi that Odysseus intends for Penelope are a kind of "love song."
Compare "Cherubino's devinalh" in Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
From Le nozze di Figaro, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte)
"Cherubino's song":
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voi che sapete che cosa è amor, donne vedete s'io l'ho nel cor! quello ch'io provo, vi ridir": è per me nuovo, capir nol so! sento un affetto pien de desir, ch'ora è diletto, ch'ora è martir, gelo e poi sento l'alma vampar, e in un momento torno a gelar. ricerco un bene fuori di me, no so chi il tiene, o so cos' è; sospiro e gemo senza voler, palpito e fremo senza saper; non trovo pace notte né di ma pur mi piace languir così! voi che sapete... |
You, who know what thing love is... My ladies, see if I have it in my heart. That thing that I experience, to you I will retell. It's new to me, I don't know how to grasp it. I feel a longing full of desire, which is at one moment delight, another moment, pain. I freeze, and then I sense the soul bursting into flame. And, the next second, I turn back to freezing. I search for a good thing outside of me. I don't know who holds it, or have any idea what it is. I sigh and moan without wanting to, I throb and tremble without knowing, I don't find any peace, night or day. But still it gives me pleasure to languish this way. You, who know what thing love is..
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In Cherubino's song, Mozart is using a form of troubadour songmaking called the devinalh. It is meant to be understood only by the addressee / beloved of the singer / lover.
The devinalh is parallel to the ainos. Let us review the definition of ainos in the glossary: 'authoritative utterance for and by a social group; praise; fable'; ainigma 'riddle'
a. 'praise' as in the victory-songs of Pindar
b. 'fable' as in the Fables of Aesop
c. 'riddle' as in the Riddle of the Sphinx, a key symbol in the Oedipus Tyrannos of Sophocles, which we will read later on.
Review from earlier dialogues... One of the clearest examples of ainos is the klea andrōn of Iliad IX 524, referring to the narrative that is "totally recalled" by Phoenix for Achilles and the other assembled philoi. The ainos here is signaled by what anthropologists call an "index" word (houtō 'thus' at Iliad IX 524). An example of an "index" expression in English: "once upon a time..."
Review the prerequisites of ainos:
a. sophos (plural sophoi) 'skilled, skilled in understanding special language'
b. agathos (plural agathoi) 'good, noble'
c. philos (plural philoi) 'friend' (noun); 'dear, near-and-dear, belonging to self' (adjective) = 3 qualifications (1 intellectual, 2 moral, 3 emotional) required for understanding ainos in e.g. the poetics of Pindar (his medium calls itself ainos)
Reminder: ainos is to audio as sēma is to video.
As a code, the ainos (or sēma) can have hidden agenda.
It can be a secret password for initiation into mysteries, for example.
The "secret password" can take the form of a song.
Odyssey xiv 508: Eumaios compliments the speech of the disguised Odysseus by calling it an ainos
The ainos is one code, with several messages built in, only one of which is ultimately true; compare the English expression ulterior motive
anagignōskein 'recognize; read'
Compare again Aristotle Poetics 1452a29ff, discussing "recognition scenes" in e.g. tragedy (his criteria apply to epic as well): "Recognition [ana-gnō-risis] is ... a change from ignorance to knowledge [gnō-sis], tending either to affection [philia] or to enmity; it determines in the direction of good or ill fortune the fates of the people involved" (tr. Margaret Hubbard)
The "love story" of Odysseus and Penelope, which preoccupies the second half of the Odyssey, can only be understood in terms of the process of their mutual recognition.
Reassembly of identity via reassembly of ascending scale of affections (the persons with whom you identify will ultimately identify you).
Why all the difficulty of recognizing wife and father?
Cave of Polyphemos (think of the meaning of the name), where Odysseus negates his identity: nostos from the cave will be the key to noos